Global Biodiversity Information Facility

The formal members or 'Participants' in GBIF consist of countries, economies and international organizations that collaborate to advance free and open access to biodiversity data. This map displays GBIF’s national Participants as of 29 August 2017.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. The data are provided by many institutions from around the world; GBIF's information architecture makes these data accessible and searchable through a single portal. Data available through the GBIF portal are primarily distribution data on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes for the world, and scientific names data.

The mission of the Global Biodiversity information Facility (GBIF) is to facilitate free and open access to biodiversity data worldwide to underpin sustainable development. Priorities, with an emphasis on promoting participation and working through partners, include mobilising biodiversity data, developing protocols and standards to ensure scientific integrity and interoperability, building an informatics architecture to allow the interlinking of diverse data types from disparate sources, promoting capacity building and catalysing development of analytical tools for improved decision-making.

1.
Biodiversity
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Biodiversity, a contraction of biological diversity, generally refers to the variety and variability of life on Earth. One of the most widely used definitions defines it in terms of the variability within species and it is a measure of the variety of organisms present in different ecosystems. This can refer to genetic variation, ecosystem variation, or species variation within an area, biome, terrestrial biodiversity tends to be greater near the equator, which seems to be the result of the warm climate and high primary productivity. Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth, and is richest in the tropics and these tropical forest ecosystems cover less than 10 per cent of earths surface, and contain about 90 percent of the worlds species. Marine biodiversity tends to be highest along coasts in the Western Pacific, there are latitudinal gradients in species diversity. Biodiversity generally tends to cluster in hotspots, and has been increasing through time, the number and variety of plants, animals and other organisms that exist is known as biodiversity. It is a component of nature and it ensures the survival of human species by providing food, fuel, shelter, medicines. The richness of biodiversity depends on the conditions and area of the region. All species of plants taken together are known as flora and about 300,000 species of plants are known to date, all species of animals taken together are known as fauna which includes birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects, crustaceans, molluscs, etc. Rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions, more than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earths current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. More recently, in May 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described, the total amount of related DNA base pairs on Earth is estimated at 5.0 x 1037 and weighs 50 billion tonnes. In comparison, the mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC. In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all living on Earth. The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, there are microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia. Other early physical evidence of a substance is graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old meta-sedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland. More recently, in 2015, remains of life were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia. According to one of the researchers, If life arose relatively quickly on Earth, then it could be common in the universe

2.
Internet
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The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite to link devices worldwide. The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States federal government in the 1960s to build robust, the primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s. Although the Internet was widely used by academia since the 1980s, Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world. In the two decades since then, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators. The entertainment industry was initially the fastest growing segment on the Internet, the Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries, the Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage, each constituent network sets its own policies. The term Internet, when used to refer to the global system of interconnected Internet Protocol networks, is a proper noun. In common use and the media, it is not capitalized. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, the Internet is also often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network. Historically, as early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as an adjective, the designers of early computer networks used internet both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, however, the World Wide Web or the Web is only one of a large number of Internet services. The Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other web resources, linked by hyperlinks, the term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web typically used sarcastically to parody a technically unsavvy user. The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, the third site was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah Graphics Department. In an early sign of growth, fifteen sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks, early international collaborations on the ARPANET were rare. European developers were concerned with developing the X.25 networks, in December 1974, RFC675, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term internet as a shorthand for internetworking and later RFCs repeated this use. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation funded the Computer Science Network, in 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990

3.
Sustainable development
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The desirable end result is a state of society where living conditions and resource use continue to meet human needs without undermining the integrity and stability of the natural systems. As the concept developed, it has shifted to more on economic development, social development. The concept of development has been — and still is — subject to criticism. What, exactly, is to be sustained in sustainable development, Sustainable development ties together concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with the social, political, and economic challenges faced by humanity. Sustainability science is the study of the concepts of sustainable development, there is an additional focus on the present generations responsibility to regenerate, maintain and improve planetary resources for use by future generations. Sustainable development has its roots in ideas about sustainable forest management which were developed in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1713 Hans Carl von Carlowitz, a mining administrator in the service of Elector Frederick Augustus I of Saxony published Sylvicultura oeconomica. Building upon the ideas of Evelyn and French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert and his work influenced others, including Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Ludwig Hartig, eventually leading to the development of a science of forestry. Two years later, the United Nations World Charter for Nature raised five principles of conservation by which human conduct affecting nature is to be guided and judged. In 1987 the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development released the report Our Common Future, the report included what is now one of the most widely recognised definitions of sustainable development. In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development published the Earth Charter, which outlines the building of a just, sustainable and it emphasises that in sustainable development everyone is a user and provider of information. Furthermore, Agenda 21 emphasises that broad public participation in making is a fundamental prerequisite for achieving sustainable development. Broadly defined, sustainable development is an approach to growth and development and to manage natural, produced. A2013 study concluded that sustainability reporting should be reframed through the lens of four interconnected domains, ecology, economics, politics, the goals are to be implemented and achieved in every country from the year 2016 to 2030. Sustainable development, or sustainability, has described in terms of three spheres, dimensions, domains or pillars, i. e. the environment, the economy. The three-sphere framework was proposed by the economist René Passet in 1979. It has also been worded as economic, environmental and social or ecology, economy and this has been expanded by some authors to include a fourth pillar of culture, institutions or governance. The ecological stability of human settlements is part of the relationship between humans and their natural, social and built environments, also termed human ecology, this broadens the focus of sustainable development to include the domain of human health

4.
Ecosystem
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An ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment, interacting as a system. These biotic and abiotic components are regarded as linked together through nutrient cycles, as ecosystems are defined by the network of interactions among organisms, and between organisms and their environment, they can be of any size but usually encompass specific, limited spaces. Energy, water, nitrogen and soil minerals are other essential components of an ecosystem. The energy that flows through ecosystems is obtained primarily from the sun and it generally enters the system through photosynthesis, a process that also captures carbon from the atmosphere. By feeding on plants and on one another, animals play an important role in the movement of matter and they also influence the quantity of plant and microbial biomass present. Ecosystems are controlled both by external and internal factors, other external factors include time and potential biota. Ecosystems are dynamic entities—invariably, they are subject to disturbances and are in the process of recovering from some past disturbance. Ecosystems in similar environments that are located in different parts of the world can have different characteristics simply because they contain different species. The introduction of species can cause substantial shifts in ecosystem function. Internal factors not only control ecosystem processes but are controlled by them and are often subject to feedback loops. Other internal factors include disturbance, succession and the types of species present, although humans exist and operate within ecosystems, their cumulative effects are large enough to influence external factors like climate. Biodiversity affects ecosystem function, as do the processes of disturbance, classifying ecosystems into ecologically homogeneous units is an important step towards effective ecosystem management, but there is no single, agreed-upon way to do this. The term ecosystem was first used in 1935 in a publication by British ecologist Arthur Tansley, Tansley devised the concept to draw attention to the importance of transfers of materials between organisms and their environment. He later refined the term, describing it as The whole system, including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment. Tansley regarded ecosystems not simply as natural units, but as mental isolates, Tansley later defined the spatial extent of ecosystems using the term ecotope. G. Raymond Lindeman took these ideas one step further to suggest that the flow of energy through a lake was the driver of the ecosystem. Most mineral nutrients, on the hand, are recycled within ecosystems. Ecosystems are controlled both by external and internal factors, external factors, also called state factors, control the overall structure of an ecosystem and the way things work within it, but are not themselves influenced by the ecosystem

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Geographic information system
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A geographic information system is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data. What goes beyond a GIS is a spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries, in general, the term describes any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries, analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, Geographic information science is the science underlying geographic concepts, applications, and systems. GIS is a term that can refer to a number of different technologies, processes. It is attached to operations and has many applications related to engineering, planning, management, transport/logistics, insurance, telecommunications. For that reason, GIS and location intelligence applications can be the foundation for many location-enabled services that rely on analysis, GIS can relate unrelated information by using location as the key index variable. Locations or extents in the Earth space–time may be recorded as dates/times of occurrence, and x, y, and z coordinates representing, longitude, latitude, all Earth-based spatial–temporal location and extent references should be relatable to one another and ultimately to a real physical location or extent. This key characteristic of GIS has begun to open new avenues of scientific inquiry, the first known use of the term geographic information system was by Roger Tomlinson in the year 1968 in his paper A Geographic Information System for Regional Planning. Tomlinson is also acknowledged as the father of GIS, previously, one of the first applications of spatial analysis in epidemiology is the 1832 Rapport sur la marche et les effets du choléra dans Paris et le département de la Seine. The French geographer Charles Picquet represented the 48 districts of the city of Paris by halftone color gradient according to the number of deaths by cholera per 1,000 inhabitants and this was one of the earliest successful uses of a geographic methodology in epidemiology. The early 20th century saw the development of photozincography, which allowed maps to be split into layers, for one layer for vegetation. This work was drawn on glass plates but later plastic film was introduced, with the advantages of being lighter, using less storage space and being less brittle. When all the layers were finished, they were combined into one using a large process camera. Once color printing came in, the idea was also used for creating separate printing plates for each color. Computer hardware development spurred by nuclear weapon research led to general-purpose computer mapping applications by the early 1960s, the year 1960 saw the development of the worlds first true operational GIS in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada by the federal Department of Forestry and Rural Development. A rating classification factor was added to permit analysis. CGIS was an improvement over computer mapping applications as it provided capabilities for overlay, measurement and it supported a national coordinate system that spanned the continent, coded lines as arcs having a true embedded topology and it stored the attribute and locational information in separate files. As a result of this, Tomlinson has become known as the father of GIS, CGIS lasted into the 1990s and built a large digital land resource database in Canada

6.
International organization
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An international organization is an organization with an international membership, scope, or presence. There are two types, International nongovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations that operate internationally. The UN has used the term intergovernmental organization instead of organization for clarity. The first and oldest intergovernmental organization is the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, International organizations also define the salient issues and decide which issues can be grouped together, thus help governmental priority determination or other governmental arrangements

7.
Web service
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A web service is a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the World Wide Web. Another common application offered to the end user may be a mashup, where a web server consumes several web services at different machines, the W3C defines a web service generally as, A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Web services may use SOAP over HTTP protocol, allowing less costly interactions over the Internet than via proprietary solutions like EDI/B2B, besides SOAP over HTTP, web services can also be implemented on other reliable transport mechanisms like FTP. In a 2002 document, the W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group defined a Web Services Architecture, in this, It has an interface described in a machine-processable format. The term web service describes a way of integrating web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL. A web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over a network and it is a software function provided at a network address over the web with the service always on as in the concept of utility computing. Many organizations use multiple systems for management. Different software systems often need to exchange data with other. The software system that requests data is called a service requester, whereas the system that would process the request. Different software may use different programming languages, and hence there is a need for a method of exchange that doesnt depend upon a particular programming language. Most types of software can, however, interpret XML tags, thus, web services can use XML files for data exchange. Rules for communication between different systems need to be defined, such as, How one system can request data from another system, which specific parameters are needed in the data request. What would be the structure of the data produced, what error messages to display when a certain rule for communication is not observed, to make troubleshooting easier. All of these rules for communication are defined in a file called WSDL, a directory called UDDI defines which software system should be contacted for which type of data. So when one software system needs one particular report/data, it would go to the UDDI, once the software system finds out which other system it should contact, it would then contact that system using a special protocol called SOAP. The service provider system would first validate the data request by referring to the WSDL file, a Web API is a development in web services where emphasis has been moving to simpler representational state transfer based communications. RESTful APIs do not require XML-based web service protocols to support their interfaces, Automated tools can aid in the creation of a web service. For services using WSDL, it is possible to automatically generate WSDL for existing classes or to generate a class skeleton given existing WSDL

8.
Catalogue of Life
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The Catalogue of Life, started in June 2001 by Species 2000 and Integrated Taxonomic Information System, is planned to become a comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth. The Catalogue currently compiles data from 158 peer-reviewed taxonomic databases, that are maintained by specialist institutions around the world. The Catalogue provides a dynamic edition, which is updated regularly and an Annual Checklist, development of the Catalogue of Life was funded through the Species 2000 europa, 4d4Life and i4Life projects in 2003-2013. The sixteenth edition of the catalogue lists 1.64 million species for all kingdoms as of April 2016, the Catalogue of Life employs a simple data structure to provide information on synonymy, grouping within a taxonomic hierarchy, common names, distribution and ecological environment. Much of the use of the Catalogue is to provide a taxonomy for other global data portals. The public interface includes both search and browse functions as well as offering multi lingual services, Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life,2009 Annual Checklist. Blundell N. Theres more to life on Earth

9.
Global biodiversity
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Global biodiversity is the measure of biodiversity on planet Earth and is defined as the total variability of life forms. More than 99 percent of all species, that lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earths current species range from 2 million to 1012, of which about 1.6 million have been databased thus far and over 80 percent have not yet been described. More recently, in May 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described. The total amount of DNA base pairs on Earth, as an approximation of global biodiversity, is estimated at 5.0 x 1037. In comparison, the mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC. In 2013, a study published in Science estimated there to be 5 ±3 million extant species on Earth, another study, published in 2011 by PLoS Biology, estimated there to be 8.7 million ±1.3 million eukaryotic species on Earth. Some 250,000 valid fossil species have been described, Global biodiversity is affected by extinction and speciation. The background extinction rate varies among taxa but it is estimated there is approximately one extinction per million species years. Mammal species, for example, typically persist for 1 million years, Biodiversity has grown and shrunk in earths past due to abiotic factors such as extinction events caused by geologically rapid changes in climate. Climate change 299 million years ago was one such event, a cooling and drying resulted in catastrophic rainforest collapse and subsequently a great loss of diversity, especially of amphibians. However, the current rate and magnitude of extinctions are much higher than background estimates and this, considered by some to be leading to the sixth mass extinction, is a result of human impacts on the environment. Habitat change is the most important driver currently affecting biodiversity, as some 40% of forests, other drivers are, overexploitation, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. Biodiversity is usually plotted as the richness of a geographic area, types of biodiversity include taxonomic or species, ecological, morphological, and genetic diversity. Taxonomic diversity, that is the number of species, genera, a few studies have attempted to quantitatively clarify the relationship between different types of diversity. Based on Chapmans report, the numbers of described extant species as of 2009 can be broken down as follows. 10-30 million insects, 5-10 million bacteria,1, in one species of tree, Erwin identified 1200 beetle species, of which he estimated 163 were found only in that type of tree. Given the 50,000 described tropical tree species, Erwin suggested that there are almost 10 million beetle species in the tropics, in 2011 a study published in PLoS Biology estimated there to be 8.7 million ±1.3 million eukaryotic species on Earth

10.
Encyclopedia of Life
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The Encyclopedia of Life is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.9 million living species known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world and it aims to build one infinitely expandable page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text. In addition, the Encyclopedia incorporates content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the project was initially backed by a US$50 million funding commitment, led by the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, who provided US$20 million and US$5 million, respectively. The project was led by Jim Edwards and the development team by David Patterson. Today, participating institutions and individual donors continue to support EOL through financial contributions, EOL went live on 26 February 2008 with 30,000 entries. The site immediately proved to be popular, and temporarily had to revert to demonstration pages for two days when it was overrun by traffic from over 11 million views it received. The site relaunched on 5 September 2011 with a redesigned interface, eOLv2 is redesigned to enhance usability and encourage contributions and interactions among users. The product is also internationalized with interfaces provided for English, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Serbian, Macedonian, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Ukrainian language speakers. On 16 January 2014, EOL launched TraitBank, a searchable, open digital repository for organism traits, measurements, interactions, information about many species is already available from a variety of sources, in particular about the megafauna. Gathering currently available data on all 1.9 million species will take about 10 years, as of September 2011, EOL had information on more than 700,000 species available, along with more than 600,000 photos and millions of pages of scanned literature. The initial focus has been on living species but will later include extinct species, as the discovery of new species is expected to continue, the encyclopedia will grow continuously. The goal of EOL is to serve as a resource for the public, enthusiastic amateurs, educators, students. The Encyclopedia of Life has content partners around the world who share information through the EOL platform, including Wikipedia and its interface is translated at translatewiki. net. The Encyclopedia of Life – Introductory video on YouTube from May 2007

Biodiversity, a portmanteau of "bio" (life) and "diversity", generally refers to the variety and variability of life on …

A sampling of fungi collected during summer 2008 in Northern Saskatchewan mixed woods, near LaRonge is an example regarding the species diversity of fungi. In this photo, there are also leaf lichens and mosses.

Example of hardware for mapping (GPS and laser rangefinder) and data collection (rugged computer). The current trend for geographical information system (GIS) is that accurate mapping and data analysis are completed while in the field. Depicted hardware (field-map technology) is used mainly for forest inventories, monitoring and mapping.

An example of use of layers in a GIS application. In this example, the forest-cover layer (light green) forms the bottom layer, with the topographic layer (contour lines) over it. Next up is a standing water layer (pond, lake) and then a flowing water layer (stream, river), followed by the boundary layer and finally the road layer on top. The order is very important in order to properly display the final result. Note that the ponds, layered under the streams, so that a stream line can be seen overlying one of the ponds.

A web service is a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other …

Web services architecture: the service provider sends a WSDL file to UDDI. The service requester contacts UDDI to find out who is the provider for the data it needs, and then it contacts the service provider using the SOAP protocol. The service provider validates the service request and sends structured data in an XML file, using the SOAP protocol. This XML file would be validated again by the service requester using an XSD file.